Merging partitions
Merging multiple partitions is common as the partitions age (become less frequently queried) or when you need to reduce the total number of database files. For example, in the year 2013, we might not be particularly interested in data from the 1990s but could expect historical data to be queried occasionally. If so, we could keep monthly partitions for the current year but merge partitions for each previous year into yearly partitions and perhaps even merge all of the 1990s data into a decade-level partition. If you work in an environment where data must be aggregated many times each day, you might create multiple partitions throughout the day and later merge all intraday partitions into a single daily partition. As you will learn in Chapter 8, Administering and Monitoring Analysis Services, synchronization speed is largely dependent on the number of files that must be transferred. Therefore, merging partitions could also optimize synchronization speed.
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